essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
like you are the aurora borealis, a thirsty balloon,
wanting and worthy of more air, ready to gorge
on forest fruits, and salt and garlic, and cinnamon,
like you are every season and its harvest
Our joke ran
that I would hand him the ladybird kite,
him in his little black windbreaker,
and I’d plead with him to hold on,
and he’d smile like all the world wasn’t enough,
My weight is
three black labradors lazing
a mummy moon bear
or a black and white ostrich
In the courtyard, at the entrance to the bookshop, an egg smashed on the cobbled ground – albumen, yolk and the bald outline and bulging eye of an almost-bird.
stick your worm-like head
to the surface of muddy waters
will yourself into existence
I grab the deck rail,
expecting a disturbance
—a pitching and yawing—
but the ferry glides smoothly
over the sea’s fleecy crimp,
like a brush through kid fibre.
They don’t make
houses pink and white
like coconut ice-cream.
They’re always plain, dull colors.
It’s all so easy
when it should be exhilarating.
The body wants to do the dropout boogie,
a way to just slowly spiral out
of reality and not include my self with its accessories
I see the cat before the cat sees me.
White with black splotches, a longhair.
Leaving the law behind it,
stealing easily as light fails
Everybody called her ‘a character’,
a regular in the library
in her shabby Barbour jacket
and crumpled hat perched
on hair dishevelled as a bird’s nest.
When I bent down to give her a kiss,
she quacked
Then exploded with loud report
into hundreds of pieces.
There is an unspoken rule in a therapy group that you are not going to go out for a beer afterwards. It’s the same way that no-one actually tells you that you shouldn’t have sex with someone you just met on the third day of a meditation retreat, but you still know it isn’t a very good idea.
Porridge 